


Sometimes

by theirontriad



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Abandoned as of 03/2016, Character Death, Gen, In which the author was disappointed in The Blood of Olympus and tries to fix it, may not be totally canon compliant, vent fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-16
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2018-03-13 04:33:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3368030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theirontriad/pseuds/theirontriad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, things end. And they don't end well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fire (Frank)

Fire is dangerous.

Hazel knows it. Leo knows it. Frank knows most of all.

Sometimes, no preparation or praying or fire-proof bag is going stop it on its destructive course.

When the time comes, Nico had told him, it’s going to happen. There’s no stopping it. Frank had resigned himself to that, a long time ago, but when Leo had given him the bag—when he had secured it to his belt, safe—he’d let himself hope. Maybe, there would be a day when he could take it out of that bag, with wiry fingers spotted with age, and feed it to a flame, on his own terms.

It had been a futile hope. A stupid one. Once a demigod, always a demigod, and if your life isn’t in danger on a daily basis then you’re already dead. A fire-proof bag wasn’t going to change that. Sure, it’s enchanted so that only he could open it. But there’s always going to be something out there that can eat through magic, that can steal it from him, that can burn through the bag and him with it. And he’s never been the most coordinated guy around. Might well be that someday he gets his hands caught in the pull string or something and sends the damned stick into a conveniently placed fire.

He remembers how terrible it felt, in Alaska, as he was watching his life burn through Thanatos’ chains. The flame of life, eating through a stupid little stick that governed his. He’d wondered, sometimes, what would happen if he didn’t burn it—just destroyed it. Scattered it into the wind, a thousand little pieces. He wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up dead anyway, through some caveat that Hera hasn’t seen fit to tell him.

So it’s almost a relief when it happens.

It’s not as dramatic as he thought it might have been. Well, being in battle was plenty dramatic, and fighting next to his father— _Mars, it’s really_ Mars—was nothing to laugh at. But when the time comes, it feels like the comedown from a high. His blood is pumping hard. He feels magic thrumming in his bones. He’s ready to turn into a bear, an elephant, a dragon if the need be—and then the Argo II, fighting strong alongside them, blows in a sea of green.

He remembers, in that split second, the metal box he keeps under his bed in his cabin. The bag inside.

Greek fire can burn underwater. Greek fire can burn through Celestial bronze. Greek fire, if used right, can burn a god.

He watches the ship as it tumbles out of the sky, watches more explosions tear through its hull, as if in slow motion.

He keeps watching as he feels the energy leave his bones, and he falls.

He takes it back. In reflection, he thinks that it’s plenty dramatic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a vent fic. May not be 100% canonically correct, as I sped-read BoO and could not be bothered to reread. Not beta'd, so let me know if you spot errors!


	2. Truth (Piper)

“Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. It’s the way things are, and it’s the way things will be, and the best thing you can do is wait out the storm.”

When Piper was little, she would sit out late on summer nights with Grandpa Tom, and he would tell her stories about anything and everything. About the stars. About the spirits. About the sky and the earth and the wind in the willows. He would let her ask questions, and would try his best to answer; more often than not, he would tell her another story by way of explaining. But one day, in late August, she had come home from school to find her father hunched over his chair, a haggard look on his face.

Grandpa Tom had cancer. And it wasn’t going away.

He hadn’t wanted to go to a hospital, so Piper had visited him in his cabin, where he was sitting on his porch, as he always was, with his pipe in his mouth. She’d looked up at him, and he’d looked back, his eyes crinkling in the corners. He’d looked the same to her.

She’d clambered up into his lap, and made him put his arms around her.

“Why?” she’d asked. And he’d told her.

Piper had thought about it for a long time since. She’d thought about it every time her father had had to leave for a role. She’d thought about it every time she’d slipped a knickknack into her pocket with a glance at the clerk. She’d thought about it every time she’d locked herself in the supply room closet at Wilderness School and cried herself to sleep.

_The best thing you can do is wait out the storm._

There is a storm above her now. It could be Percy, or Jason, or any one of the _Gigantes_ , but it makes no difference. Her hair is whipping around her, and she can hear roars, and screeches, and hissing—calls to the chaos of the wind. Katoptris is in her hand, and almost unconsciously, she slashes with it, waiting for the feeling dust beneath the knife.

It doesn’t come.

The _dracanae_ laughs, viciously, its claws clenched around her wrist. Something is holding Piper down, and it _hurts_. She struggles not to crumble beneath the weight of it.

“ _Let me go_ ,” she says, and then realizes that that’s all she’s been saying, again and again—and that it’s not working. “ _Let me go!_ ”

“Did you think that would work on usss? The queensss of illusssion?” Another one, behind her, grabs her hair and yanks it back. Piper winces and clenches her teeth, unwilling to cry out.

It feels like a nightmare come to life.

_“We see you, Piper McLean.” The girls advance on her, all of them tall, dangerous, with faces cloaked in shadow. “We see you for what you are.”_

_“Unworthy,” one spits, “unworthy of love. Unworthy of attention.” She bulges out, shrinks, and begins to scuttle, movements short and sharp. She advances._

_“Desperate for it, aren’t you?” another coos. “So desperate for daddy’s love.” She grows as Piper watches, turns green and putrid, and on her shadowed face bares a wretched too-wide grin._

_“It’s not yours to have. It never was.” This one is slick as a serpent and moves like one, slinking forward with barely contained malice.  “No one—no one—can love you. Why, they have to be cursed, coerced, memory-wiped to do it.”_

_The last one is the worst._

_“You can’t talk yourself out of this one, Piper.” Her tone is calm. Soothing. “It’s the truth.”_

_It sounds like her mother._

Katoptris is wrenched from her grasp, and held against her throat. She looks up, and sees the storm swirling into a hurricane.

“Another one to the Earth Mother!”

She falls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, may not be canonically correct. Apologies, for that.


	3. Poison (Percy)

It’s not like dying has never crossed Percy’s mind.

He’s a half-blood. Life-threatening danger sort of comes with the territory. Sure, he’s survived the underworld, a mad blind Cyclops, several angry Titans, the Minoan labyrinth, and more than a few pissed-off gods—but every time he has, he sends a prayer up to whoever’s managed to keep him from getting brained so far. He’s given up the expectation of having any kind of peace since he found out about the demigod thing—or maybe even the having-been-kicked-out-of-every-school-since-kindergarten thing. Still, he thinks that he turned out okay.

Even when he was, for a brief time, invincible, he never had any expectations for his survival. Besides, invincible with an Achilles-lower-back wasn’t really invincible. Luke didn’t survive. Neither did Achilles, for that matter. Dying’s always been a natural thing for a demigod, to be expected. Thing is, Percy had always thought that he would go in the midst of battle, fighting alongside his friends, his family, for something that was worth something.

He didn’t expect to go like this.

When Polybotes holds him down, and poison is rushing into his lungs, he doesn’t fight. His brain is screaming at him to do something and a voice in the back of his head is telling him control the poison—you’ve done it before. What’s stopping you from saving yourself? What’s stopping you from sending it after the giant? But before he can do anything more than think, another image comes to mind.

_“Stop…” she pleaded, her voice hoarse._

Akhlys. He remembers Akhlys, back in the Underworld, tears streaming from her emaciated face as she chokes, sputters, sobs. He never knew that a goddess could be so harmed by her own element.

He wanted to watch her drown in her own poison. He wanted to see just how much misery Misery could take.

He remembers the look on Annabeth’s face, after. “ _Some things aren’t meant to be controlled_.” He remember the feeling within himself, the feel of broken glass and sharp edges and unhinged power.

He doesn’t want to feel that again. He doesn’t want to remember the anguish that Annabeth had looked at him with, or the fear in her eyes.

So when the poison _black, oily, like the plague_ envelopes him, he doesn’t fight. And when the weighted net comes crashing down on him, knocking the breath—water?—from his lungs, his mouth opens to swallow more in, choking him _like Akhlys did, like what he did to Akhlys_. The Fates know justice, and this is his. He knows it.

As Percy sinks down, he allows himself a moment of reflection before his mind loses its coherence.

So he’s not going to live and get his happily ever after. It would have been stupid to hope. But he’s not going to be able to die next to his friends, either—with Annabeth and Hazel and Frank and Piper and Jason and Leo—and it feels wrong, like his death will be incomplete without his friends to bear witness, without Annabeth to look at before he closes his eyes for the last time. But then, since when had he ever had it easy? Some god or another has always had it out for him. Aphrodite has always been determined to make his love life impossible. Ares would pulverize him at any opportunity. And Hades—well, Hades has never exactly let go of the grudge he holds on Percy’s existence.

He never expected to have an ideal death, anyway.


End file.
